How to make oxygen on the moon
Inside a giant sphere, the engineers pored over their equipment. Before them stood a silvery metal contraption swathed in colourful wires – a box that they hope will one day make oxygen on the moon.
Once the team vacated the sphere, the experiment began. The box-like machine was now ingesting small quantities of a dusty regolith – a mixture of dust and sharp grit with a chemical composition mimicking real lunar soil.
Soon, that regolith was gloop. A layer of it heated to temperatures above 1,650C. And, with the addition of some reactants, oxygen-containing molecules began to bubble out.
“We’ve tested everything we can on Earth now,” says Brant White, a program manager at Sierra Space, a private company. “The next step is going to the moon.”
Sierra Space’s experiment unfolded at Nasa’s Johnson Space Center this summer. It is far from the only such technology that researchers are working on, as they develop systems that could supply astronauts living on a future lunar base.
